Mel picks up the phone. “If this movie is remembered at all in fifty years, it will be recalled as a snuff piece…less a work of art than a shock treatment, lacking in nuance or complexity. Okay,” Mel says, “look. Without getting too precious about it, art is what it is. And to use a work as a scapegoat for the crazy things people do is real, real shortsighted. So the next time he stages a goddamn puppet show with the ladies he rows crew with, let him slice the hell out of whatever he writes and retain whatever sense of superiority he can get out of it. Just because the movie made him uncomfortable does not give him the right to create some ridiculous causality between two events. I can’t help it if shitheel here walked in expecting Toy Story.”
Glynnis smiles.
Yeah. It’s real interesting when Mel flies off the handle, isn’t it, I think. “But there were other reviews,” I cut in, leaning forward to make Glynnis look me in the eye. “People who appreciated the movie’s honesty, its undiluted quality.” Rein her in, I will Glynnis. Control this interview, you patronizing twat. I know the landscape of Mel’s impulses and she is not on level ground right now. If something rubs her the wrong way, she will blow. And when it happens, it’s fast. It’s a T-bone at an intersection.
Mel recrosses her legs. Her left foot jounces up up up up up.
Glynnis changes the subject. “Let’s talk a little bit about your technical approach. Some have said that your decision to not use advanced CGI is—what’s the word here—contrarian?”
“We actually use CGI,” I correct her. “It would be hard to be a two-man operation without it. We use it in conjunction with traditional cel-by-cel tactics. And we do it because we believe in the technique, and we like the results. Period.”
Mel cuts in. “Lemme tell you something,” she says, and her voice is high and fast, still amped from the Salon story. “The time those guys who call us contrarian spend yapping is time we spend busting ass old-school. It’s like, Well, suckle my nuts, look at Johnny Seven-Figures using Maya to make a twenty-million-dollar movie. You know what? Fuck that. Johnny Seven-Figures is copping out of what makes him a cartoonist. He is compromising. If you get your meat from a bad cow, you’re gonna get a bad burger, you know what I’m saying? We are slaving away over the drafting board eating that burger medium rare because we know our butcher, Glynnis. And I don’t care if that cow rolled around in a kiddie pool of its own poo-poo, it’s a risk we’re gonna take. I will eat it because we do this honest or not at all.”
Mel leans back in her seat, takes a breath.
Glynnis is frozen in her chair. “Well put,” she manages.
I look over at Mel. Mouth, Who the fuck is Johnny Seven-Figures?
Glynnis turns to me, and in the bright, loud voice of someone changing the subject: “Your name is quite the draw, Sharon.”
For fuck’s sake. How many times do we have to go through this. I grind my molars. “It’s. Scottish.”
“It’s awesome, is what it is,” Mel says. “I spent two hundred bucks changing my name legally from Melody to Mel and she gets to be Sharon Kisses for free.”
“I wish I could change it,” I mutter.
Mel chortles. “She’ll never change it. It gets her tail. Men shit when they hear the name Sharon Kisses. For serious.”
Mel’s voice dips, goes hoarse. She’s Drunk Mel now. Glynnis pushed her by talking up that goddamn Salon story. Now she’s acting out. Overcompensating. When Mel feels sad—and right now it strikes me that Mel is, in fact, very, very sad, and has been this whole summer—she tries to make up for it by manufacturing joy. I was a moron to hope there was any way of walking into this pretending to be sober.
Glynnis gives a nervous titter. My hand wraps around the microphone perched in front of me. I try to see if I can lift it. It’s nailed down.
Mel slaps my knee. “It’s cool. I got my demons, too. When my mom got knocked up with me, she was real dandy to do a DIY abort job because she was too cheap to go to the clinic, right? And she heard somewhere that an excess of vitamin C could kill a baby in utero. So she took a metric butt-ton of C, like orange juice injections straight up the cooter. As an adult? I almost never get sick. True story. Almost made it into the movie, that bit. But it just ended up making sweet, sweet love to the cutting room floor.”
She’s throttling her microphone now, too. I can see it loosening off the dash, unknowingly making purchase while she talks.
“It’s true,” Mel says. “It’s near impossible to overdose on vitamin C. You just end up shitting it out.”
Glynnis nearly chokes.
“Try that with other vitamins. Vitamin D? You’ll end up with a giant purple eye. Vitamin A? Testicles like pumpkins. But C? Just sluices on through, babe. Like me.”
Mel leans over the table and the microphone rips from the dash. There’s a spark, that electrical spit of a device cutting out. The sound engineer jumps up, waving his arms.
Mel says, “Crap.”
Glynnis freezes. Looks at me. And for the first time in the interview, I laugh. I laugh, and I don’t know what it means or where it’s coming from. But for once, I’m not forcing it.
“Oh ho,” Glynnis says. “You two. I think we’ll wrap it up here.”
—
I don’t talk on the elevator. The silence trails us out onto Sixth Avenue.
“I don’t know what your problem is,” Mel says. “She liked us. Aside from the broken mic. Why are you so moody all of a sudden?”
“My interpretation of a good interview is one where you don’t talk about how much tail I do or don’t get.”
“I was trying to guide her away from that stupid Salon article because I was sick of talking about it. It’s called a joke.”